Online commerce is a rapidly growing sector of the global economy. Merchants are attracted to online retailing for its scalability and cost-effectiveness, while customers are attracted to it for its convenience and ease of use. As sellers and businesses establish online commerce sites and affiliate with other merchants, the proliferation of web servers, pages and commerce applications becomes increasingly more difficult to manage. Furthermore, because these multiple servers, data warehouses and networks become more scattered and spread out geographically, merchants and business are finding it more difficult to maintain a consistent corporate image and brand identity. In addition, because each of these servers and pages may be administered or managed by different people within the same or even different organizations, it is also difficult for the merchant or business to comply with numerous regulatory, security, industry and internal standards.
Vendors who sell electronic and web commerce applications to facilitate online transactions are faced with similar difficulties in enforcing their own content standards. For example, an online transaction vendor may wish to charge a different rate for its transaction service depending on a variety of factors, including, for example, the number of transactions conducted on merchant's site, the total sales, the type of goods or services offered, or the type of site. When the vendor and the merchant agree on a pricing schedule, the vendor must ensure that the merchant is complying not only with industry regulations, but also with its own standards. The vendor needs to know that the merchant is not using its transaction services to conduct commerce that would be inappropriate or require a different fee arrangement.
Furthermore, in those situations where a single merchant runs their site across a number of web servers, the vendor needs to treat those different servers as one, and that all of those separate servers are all complying with the appropriate standards. However, the process of assessing and verifying compliance with standards can be costly and time consuming, and in many cases incomplete because sites that are affiliated with a particular merchant but not under that merchant's direct control are often not checked for compliance with this standard.
What is needed is a system that can search, scan, store, analyze and assess all of the online content of a particular merchant website based on a combination of technical and textual criteria that captures all of the website associated with a merchant, identifies those that are and are not under the control of the merchant, and determines the level of compliance with any of a number of different criteria, some of which may be specific to or different for each merchant. Furthermore, the output of this system must be easily understood by compliance officers and corporate executives who may not have a technical background. Furthermore, the system should periodically monitor the content of the merchant sites to ensure that they remain in compliance.